“Our children deserve a future free of plastic waste and all its dangerous effects, everything from clogging our oceans to killing animals – polluting the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat,” she said Newsom, a Democrat. a statement. “Not anymore.” Stakeholders negotiated the language around the bill, trying to craft a law that would significantly limit plastic production, boost recycling and composting, and shift the burden of plastic pollution onto industry. Newsom signed the law just as the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal Clean Air Act does not give the Environmental Protection Agency broad authority to regulate global warming emissions from power plants. The opinion was roundly criticized by environmental advocates and scientists who are sounding the alarm that the world is running out of time to get the climate crisis under control. Plastics are responsible for at least 232 million tons of global warming emissions each year, according to a report published last year. That’s about the same amount as the average emissions from 116 coal-fired power plants. “Remember that when you make plastic, there are greenhouse gas emissions, but these facilities also emit enormous amounts of toxins and particulates into the air,” Judith Enck, a former regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency and now president of Beyond Plastics, told CNN. “It’s really a health threat.” Plastics also exacerbate environmental injustice. As the industry expands, refineries and production facilities tend to set up shop in marginalized communities of color. According to the report, more than 90% of climate pollution from the plastics industry occurs in 18 communities along the Gulf Coast that are home to mostly low-income residents and people of color. “California will not tolerate plastic waste clogging up our waterways and making it harder to breathe,” Newsom said. “We hold polluters responsible and cut plastics at the source.” The Ocean Conservancy, one of the nonprofits involved in crafting the bill’s language, estimated that the new law could eliminate just 23 million tons of plastic debris over the next decade — about 26 times the weight of the Golden Gate Bridge. “It’s hard to grasp how important this is,” Anja Brandon, US plastics policy analyst at the Ocean Conservancy and a lead contributor to the bill’s text, said in a statement. “We can’t solve this problem without U.S. leadership, and by passing this law, California is righting the ship. This is a huge win for our ocean.” While the new law is a clear win for the climate, environment and communities around plastics facilities, leaders in the plastics industry do not support it. “The Plastics Industry Association is disappointed that, ultimately, we cannot support today’s signed version of Senate Bill 54,” said Matt Seaholm, president and CEO of the Plastics Industry Association. “The plastics industry remained committed to a final compromise bill that we could support, supporting a circular approach to eliminating plastic waste, which, unfortunately, we do not believe this bill achieves.” A key measure of the law requires plastic producers to pay $500 million to the state each year for 10 years starting in 2027, which will be collected into the California Plastic Pollution Mitigation Fund. The fund will then be dedicated to “mitigating the environmental impact of plastic,” the law says. While California’s new law puts a strong emphasis on recycling, environmental experts are sounding the alarm about the inefficiency of plastic recycling. California, for example, has not met state goals of recycling 75 percent of waste by 2020. Of the state’s 77.4 million tons of waste generated in 2020, about 42 percent was recycled or diverted, according to a report of the California Department of Resource Recycling In 2021, Americans recycled only about 5% of their plastic waste, down from a high of 9.5% in 2014. “In this time of extreme polarization in our nation, California was able to show that we can pass strong environmental legislation with bipartisan support that brought together the environmental and business communities,” said California State Sen. Ben Allen, author of the legislation. a statement. “With this new law, California continues its tradition of global environmental leadership.”
